IT industry is undergoing a revolution in the area of virtualization for the benefit of low-cost and flexibility. A typical network deployment scenario has a security gateway deployed at the edge of the network to protect virtual machines that run on servers. Each of these virtual machines may have one or more connections with other devices in the network.
However, as the security gateway is deployed at the perimeter of the data center, it has no knowledge of when a new virtual machine is created. If the virtual machine moves to a different host with a different IP address, the security gateway does not know that such a move occurred. Thus, the security gateway is not able to forward the packets of on-going connections to the correct virtual machine.